


Why Magic and History Don't Mix

by otblock57



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Cross-Posted on FanFiction.Net, Fanfiction, Ficlet Collection, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:48:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27404587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/otblock57/pseuds/otblock57
Summary: Magic is a powerful tool, so why didn't people use it to change history? A collection of a few short stories where magic changes history, whether in a major or minor way.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	1. 1-5

1\. Rex Britannorum

Felix could scarcely believe that they were here, the prows of their triremes slicing through the salty waters of the ocean that lay past Gaul. Julius Caesar had ordered a great campaign to bring the people of the isle of Britannia to heel, and it still felt like a dream.

For most of his life, he thought Britannia and her sister island, Hibernia, were the stuff of fantasy, hoaxes fabricated by Greek explorers, but when he saw the milk white cliffs of this strange land, his heart raced. He had accompanied Caesar on his first expedition to the island, but they were forced to leave by poor weather. The glory of going beyond the edge of the known world was more than worth it, and now the Romans returned in force.

They had heard rumors of the tribes of this strange land forming a great coalition under the command of a Cassivellaunus, who was king of a tribe called the Trinovantes. This land was rife with petty lords, but these tribal allies had proven useless against the might of Rome. Now, Julius Caesar marched against the stronghold of Cassivellaunus, and it was as grand and terrible as buildings could get outside of Rome.

It was situated on a great hill, whose top was ringed by palisades of sharpened logs stood up and ditches dug into the soil. A great series of earthworks at the top of the hill held what may have passed for a palace for these barbarians, a great circular structure made of logs that seethed with activity, both with soldiers and with men in great white robes who must have been the druids who played such a large part in the ruling of this land.

Caesar rode beside his men on a horse as black as the night, the muscles of its back covered with a leopard pelt from foreign Anatolia or from the northern reaches of Africa or Mauretania. When Caesar rode in front of the men, Felix could hear shouting in the barbarian hillfort, as if they realized how truly outmatched they were by Julius Caesar.

Squinting, he could see some of the druids leading a goat up to the walls, before cutting its throat with a knife, letting the red blood drip unto their hands before raising them to the sky and beginning to chant as a sort of ghastly miasma rose from the goat's body. It gathered in their hands, in a shimmering ball of foul energy that made Felix sick just by looking at it. He opened his mouth to warn his fellows, to warn Caesar, when the ball soared with all the speed of a ballista bolt, straight towards Caesar.

The moment the foul energy struck Caesar, a gash cut across his neck, sending him stumbling from his horse as the legionnaires broke into a panic and the Celts began to attack, those damned druids shouting a strange, intelligible war cry that sent chills down his back as they began to charge. _"Get off our bloody island, you Roman bastards!"_

They fled, but the ships they used to arrive in Britannia were under attack as well, by a great chimera made from fire, all writhing bodies and gnashing teeth but shaped from flames instead of flesh. Felix lived up to his name and was lucky enough to escape onto one of the boats that wasn't consumed by the flames. As they sailed away, they could see the cliffs of Britannia being swallowed up by a tremendous fog, and when the wind blew it clear there was nothing at all, as if the entire country had disappeared, Caesar and the majority of his men along with it.

* * *

2\. A City on the Lake

Hernan Cortes had come to conquer the backwards heathens of the New World, and made allies with the tributaries of these strange devil worshippers. While they were heathens who knew nothing of the true God, they were useful heathens who could help him overthrow the Aztec Triple Alliance.

Cortes first met their pagan emperor in their city Tenochtitlan, which stood on the center of lake Texcoco and was truly a marvel, as loath as he was to admit it. Vibrant gardens bloomed with plants of all sorts, and while some floated on the surface of the lake, many floated in the air, suspended by whatever strange magicks these people used. He was not unfamiliar with magic, of course, but to see it so widely accepted made his stomach churn. His men marched across a narrow bridge to the city proper, strange shadows rippling across the steel of their armor as the floating gardens drifted overhead.

Their culture was incredibly strange, they had wealth beyond imagining, their foul idols crafted with gold and jewels, and yet they couldn't even realize how valuable all that gold was- they traded with beans from a plant, of all things! The markets bustled with people beyond counting, and they had great temples, constructed upon massive pyramids which were made of a white material, although their stairs were dyed a deep red for a reason Cortes could not comprehend.

The emperor wore a tunic of a dark blue material, and his retinue wore grand headdresses full of beautiful feathers that seemed to gleam in the sun, and some even changed colors, shifting between vibrant greens, light blues, and deep crimsons in strange rippling patterns. What sort of strange bird had feathers like that? They wore the skins of jaguars and carried shields and strange wooden clubs with razor sharp fragments of obsidian sticking out.

The emperor had invited him to stay, and Cortes agreed. They were accommodating beyond all measure, although they refused to let him erect a cross and an image of the Blessed Virgin next to their pagan idols, and they soon broke out into fighting, and while the Spanish had steel arms and many allies from the Aztec's rivals, the Aztec priests seemed to practice a foul sort of magic that stunned his men with ease and sent him into a deep sleep.

He awoke to the sun high in the sky above him, and although he could barely sense anything other than the heat and glare of the sun, he thought he could see the glint something black reflecting the sun before he felt a great pain in his chest, saw a pair of hands holding something red above him, and then knew no more.

* * *

3\. A Domesday Doomsday

When William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, invaded England and made himself king, he found himself ruling a country that he knew very little about, and he set out to conduct a grand survey of all England, to see what land belonged to the king in every shire in England. The Domesday book would allow William to conduct taxes after his invasion so thoroughly reshaped England, and he meant to see all of his subjects, including the magical sort.

Magical communities spotted the country, but still swore their fealty to the King of England, and they were included in William's great survey, even if they stifled under his control. Some of the most notable conductors of these surveys were a collection of exiled ex-French magical nobility who fled with William, and while they won themselves a great place in William's new government they would forever be branded as treacherous men of bad faith, or in their native French, "mal foi", and in time the nickname became the official name of the House of Malfoy.

Of course, with such a valuable document, copies were made, especially with the printing press, and many copies were squirreled away all over Britain. Of course, that never became a problem until the wizarding world decided to hide itself away from the muggle world, and while magical editors did edit the official copy of the Domesday Book to make the portions describing magical communities only readable by a wizard, many copies went undetected…

"Professor?"

"Yes, what is it?

"I've been looking through the university's copy of the Domesday book, the oldest one, and there are several locations mentioned that more modern surveys don't bring up."

"Whatever do you mean, my boy?"

"There are tracts of land in many towns that aren't reported in more recent sources, houses in places like Appleby and Ottery St Catchpole. Entire portions of London have disappeared, and a settlement called Hogsmeade has vanished from the books entirely."

"Well, perhaps we should investigate this. Come on, I've got some contacts in London!"

It was almost pathetic that the wizards went to all the effort to hide their society with magic and charms only for a university student to blow the whole case wide open.

* * *

4\. The Great War

More than anything, Andrew wished that he was home again, in his mother's arms or listening to his father's advice over dinner, instead of in these damned fields in Belgium. The land had been churned into a great sea of brown by the shells, and it felt like he was drowning in the foul air of the trenches, but couldn't surface for fear of a German sniper.

He had gotten his father's permission to enlist, high on stories of glory and fame, but the trenches were anything but. Of course, there were parts of the trenches he was sure no one at home would believe, and he knew any attempts to talk about it in his letters would be pointless.

The first time he realized that something supernatural was going on was during the Christmas truce, when the men stopped fighting for a few glorious hours. At first, he thought he was dreaming, but the soldiers of both sides were stunned into silence by an incredible display in the sky, like the most complex fireworks he had ever seen- great snakes of fire dancing in the sky, bursts of light that changed from glimmering emerald to gold and every shade imaginable, and the strangest feeling of contentment settled over him.

Of course, the truce was temporary, and more supernatural things came, terrible things. In the middle of January, the German high command released _something_ near the trenches, and whatever it was it made the air even colder than normal, sending shivers down Andrew's spine as suddenly he was back in the trenches in October, holding Edward in his arms, crying bitter tears as his friend's blood mixed with the mud-

And then a sense of sheer joy overcame him, like he was back at home in England with his family, and looking up he saw a great lion roaring triumphantly in no man's land, its cloak a gleaming, translucent silver that shone as bright as the moon. From the German trenches, an eagle of the same coloring soared, and the two animals played with each other, nipping at each other's tails as the lion leapt over the craters and the eagle soared over the barbed wire.

In spring, an unusual man was attached to their division, who the higher ups called a "Unconventional Combat Specialist" and he introduced himself as Geoffrey. Andrew was convinced that George was suicidal, because some nights he would crawl on his belly into no man's land, with the simple explanation that he was gathering flowers. However, he did something with those flowers and made the a medicine for trench foot that practically made it vanish, so he supposed it was fine.

Andrew was a god-fearing Christian, but even he couldn't deny what he was seeing forever: ghosts were gathering by the thousands in no man's land, both modern soldiers, men he might have once known, and soldiers from the past. Napoleonic skirmishers clad in bright blues and reds broke bread with ancient Belgae tribesmen, their bare chests wet with blue woad and criss crossed with silver wounds. Ghostly pikes were planted in the muck as English men-at-arms rested next to heavy French cavalrymen they might have died fighting, as Dutch musketeers polished their ghostly arms.

By night, great hosts of phantom cavalry stormed through the fields, sounding their horns and letting out whooping battle cries in a dozen languages.

If the horrors of the war were not great enough already, magicians (because Andrew could no longer deny that was what they were) made it worse. Wards made poison gas look tame, and entire regions of the battlefield were rendered impossible to cross by a few placed stones. Complex spellwork made the trenches physically shift and bend, cutting off any enemies fortunate enough to get inside and flooding the hole with mud. Machine gun nests were invisible and artillery shells landed without a sound, great explosions that sent dirt hundreds of feet into the air with all the silence of a film.

He had heard horrible rumors of the Eastern front: vampires and werewolves, those children's tales, prowling the lines, eating their fill of Russian conscripts for the sake of their Austrian overlords. Summoned djinn doing battle in the Levant for the sake of both the Turks and Arabs, the Greeks unleashing a basilisk into Macedonia, and Banshees killing thousands of British soldiers in Ireland.

What exactly was so great about this war?

* * *

5\. Cold War

The United States of America had always had their problems with magic users. While the Salem Witch Trials didn't actually catch any real magic users, they were part of a larger anti-magic trend, and they felt obligated to follow the words of the Bible: suffer not a witch to live.

When the American Revolution came, relations between the higher ups of the American government and the magical community were poor, as they organized themselves in a structure very much like the nobility of the old world, and Congress had made a rather big deal of not issuing noble titles to their citizens.

Relations between the United States and native magic users were about as good as their relations with the other natives, which was to say exceedingly poor. Clashes between largely muggleborn mage battalions under the United States government and native magicians were common, and this animosity made expansion into the west… difficult. Somehow, the native shamans had reached an amicable agreement with the thunderbirds, and never shared the secret of this arrangement with the US government, leading to the creatures being a thorn in America's side until they got anti air guns.

The Soviet Union did not have such scruples, especially considering how oppressed magic users were by the Orthodox government of the Tsardom of Russia. Stalin did eventually have plans for a purge of magic users, in the same way he had purged the army and the doctors, but it never panned out before his death. While the noble magical families didn't manage so well, great societies of muggleborn magicians were formed, to serve the union. They also recruited many German and East European mages to enhance their research.

In secret labs in both nations, magicians explored the power of atom and discussed how it could be harnessed, made more effective or negated entirely by magic. Alchemy made acquiring obscene amounts of fusion material easier than ever before, and primitive fusion reactors were constructed used the power of magic. Nuclear bombs were enchanted to be harder to detect, enchanted to teleport like a portkey, and given limited time shrinking charms to make them easy to transport.

However, neither side was bold enough to strike, both worrying that the other had somehow created a nuclear countermeasure, which was the true holy grail of magic during the time. Magic became integrated into war, enchantments and runes as common on the battlefield as bullets.

The space race was another field that benefited tremendously from magic, especially with the discovery that transportation magic like portkeys and apparition worked to move things to space. All it took was one good rocket launch to propel a nation to the cosmic stage, or an ally with a space program. Moondust was discovered to be a powerful potion ingredient with properties that could practically cure lycanthropy, if applied correctly, and it certainly wasn't in short supply when it was only a teleport away.

Although the threat of nuclear annihilation hung over the entire world by the end of century, it did not hang over every world in the solar system, across dozens of planets and moons seeded with human life, with magic, by the work of both powers. Faster than light technology was another easy step for magic, and while mankind may have been divided, the universe waited for them, both magical and muggle.


	2. 6-10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no idea how long this will turn out to be, as a fic. Not sure if I could come up with 101 separate unique ideas or a catchy number like that, but… I’ll see how it goes.

6\. Oh Jerusalem!

There were few cities more famous, more sacred, than Jerusalem. It was the envy of priests and princes from the chalky Cliffs of Dover to the crossroads of the silk road at Samarkand. Of course, the sort of zealous ruler who would set himself upon the path of seizing Jerusalem for his own would frequently fall into feuding with the magical elements with in his nation, but magic still found itself in one of the holiest cities on Earth.

When the Romans descended upon Canaan, the Jews resisted fiercely, forming golems from the dust of the Levant, and even using the famous staff of Moses and the Rod of Aaron, to tremendous effect. In the field, Mose’s staff made Jewish armies almost invincible in battle as long as it was held in the air, and Aaron’s rod transformed into a snake that roamed Roman camps by night, leaving rows of Roman dead behind.

Plagues of all sorts slowed the Roman advance to a slog, turning water into blood and killing draft animals by the hundreds, locusts that came in clouds so thick they could blot out the sun. The Roman armies bumbled in darkness or cowered from flaming hail, but still they came. The Romans had magic of their own, augurs who could predict the enemy’s movements days in advance.

When the Bar Kokhba revolt began and the Jews revolted against their Roman overlords, magic was used in battle once more as Emperor Hadrian did battle with Simon bar Kokhba, and as the Jewish diaspora began magical techniques spread across the world as well.

When the Arab conquests came and the Rashidun caliphate seized control of Jerusalem, there was no real fighting, although that would prove to be a break from the trend, if anything. Holy relics and powerful magical artifacts were both smuggled out before the siege began in earnest although there was no real sack, and Jerusalem became Al-Quds, “The Holy One”.

Until the Crusades came down upon Jerusalem in all their fury, Jerusalem was never a true center of conflict, even if it was passed from hand to hand, from the Seljuks to the Fatimids. Arab magicians proved no less wily than their Christian or Jewish counterparts, although perhaps a little more willing to parley with djinn to get what they wanted.

The first Crusade’s entrance into Jerusalem was a brutal one, and any magicians unfortunate enough to be outside of their wards as the sack began were killed. Even if many portions of the holy city were secured by magic, the loss of knowledge was atrocious, although the resulting mix of Crusader and Arab magics proved incredibly fruitful- even if always kept away from the eyes of the King of Jerusalem. When that famed Kurd, Saladin, retook Jerusalem the Christian defense was fierce, and thousands of Christians, mostly muggles, were expelled afterwards.

The Third Crusade saw thousands of magicians being pulled from Europe in an attempt to retake Jerusalem, along with what would eventually evolve to be the Vatican’s own answer to magic, the Sacred Commission on Sorcery, which would serve as a tenuous bridge between the Holy Church and magical elements across Christendom. Much debate was had about if Papal indulgences would technically cover witches and wizards, although many magicians held… more unusual faiths and just paid lip service to Catholicism.

Jerusalem in time to be one of the great centers of magical knowledge, as libraries grew grander and wards grew more complex, supplemented by knowledge from all across the medieval world. Despite all the violence that surrounded the world’s holiest city, carefully hidden magical communities grew, enriched by an incredible mix of cultures- the cosmopolitan crusaders from France and England, the Mamluk slave soldiers of the Caucuses, and the Turkish conquerors would all shape Jerusalem in time.

The magician’s quarter of Jerusalem was perhaps the finest in the entire world, one that put wizarding enclaves like Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade to shame through sheer scale. As cramped and complex as the Medina quarters of Marrakesh or Tripoli, yet filled with buildings straight from the streets of London or Paris, walls covered in runes of every tongue: flowing Arabic calligraphy next to Greek, Latin, or even Armenian alphabets. Libraries of dozens of languages, some of which weren’t even spoken outside of the holy city spoke of creatures from every corner of the world: the Nundus which prowled the Horn of Africa, the Basilisks and Chimaera which prowled the hills of Arcadia, or the Runespoors which prowled the forests which lay to the north of the Gulf of Guinea.

The magicians of Jerusalem had survived the furor of the first Crusade, the Ottoman-Mamluk war, and the modern terrors of the first World War. The Eyalet of Damascus would eventually be replaced with the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem and then the British Mandate for Palestine, which would in time be replaced by the conflicting states of Israel and Jordan- the mages didn’t care. In time, the city became as sacred to magic users as it was to the muggle faithful, the greatest jewel in the crown of the magical world.

\------

7\. Who Needs Guns Where We’re Going?

Magic proved itself to be many times more effective than guns when facing a man in full armor, whether on foot or on an horse. Of course, a thorough application of a mace could kill a man in armor just as well as one without, magic made armor obsolete once magicians started to be integrated into standing armies.

Before fighting even began, soldiers needed to reach the battlefield, and magicians could certainly help with that- and prevent it. Something as simple as a basic levitation charm could make entire suits of armor as easy to carry as a feather, or it could turn a knight into a floating target for any soldier with a pike to go up and poke until they found a chink in their armor. A magician provided light at night and water for cleaning and drinking, and could easily do the job of a dozen blacksmiths a murmured “Reparo”. A more ambitious wizard could transform roads to muck or spook all of an enemy’s horses at once.

On the battlefield, there were few people more feared than witches and wizards. The killing curse was the most obvious example of how wizards could pierce armor, but if a magic user didn’t fancy that particular spell, there were dozens of other possibilities. An explosive spell could make armor burst like a wineskin or shatter enemy formations. Armor could be melted off a man’s body, torn off with a simple summoning charm, or transformed into cloth or air, leaving a man as defenseless as the day he was born.

When it came to weapons, a wizard could disarm a swordsman in moments, and fight with the ferocity of a hundred mundane infantry. Simple enchantments made arrows which aimed themselves, or made swords so sharp they could slide through steel and bone as easily as they tore through air. A magician who didn’t feel like wand waving could brew poisons of the foulest sort, which could spread sickness and death with a glancing blow, cause infighting among the enemy or cause him to flee from the field entirely.

In time, battle was shaped around magicians, with great masses of muggles serving to support the real powers of the battlefield. Nobility were frequently uncomfortable with this shift, and many attempted to cling onto relevance by marrying into magic- not even the high and mighty pureblood families, which looked down on them, but muggleborn and halfblood mages which were usually of much lower social status. A noble’s son marrying a farmer’s daughter that just happened to be a witch was a frequent occurrence as the non-magical nobility rushed to catch up.

In time, enterprising Chinese magicians chasing immortality would make a peculiar black powder that proved to have a tremendous ability to explode. It was certainly useful, and in time alchemists across the world would know how to make it, but it was relegated to party tricks and fireworks, at least at first. Primitive hand cannons would be trumped by magic every time: many times faster and in many cases more effective, as the first bullets were nowhere near the speed of their eventual predecessors.

Cannons turned out to be much more popular than their small-arm counterparts. A group of wizards could launch rocks with speeds like cannonballs, but it was exhausting, and an overall waste of magical talent. Magicians were moved to less exhausting ways of destroying walls: sabotaging the foundations with spellwork, creating brews caustic enough to eat through the stone and mortar of the walls (of course, a sufficiently nasty potion could be created by a first year Hogwarts student bumbling around in a Potions class, but that didn’t stop magicians from charging princely fees for them). Artillery proved to be useful in some cases: when magicians had better things to do, or as an incredibly fast way of delivering magical projectiles with all sorts of horrifying side effects.

Guns proved of particular interest to squibs, who usually had at least some magical education, but were relegated to fields where no magic was required. Potions and combat magic were obviously out, but the strange field of alchemy had some limited applications that didn’t require a wand.

Among those squibs that were supported by their families, or at least not kicked out to the streets, gunsmithing was a frequent hobby, as it gave them a means of self defense in a hostile world, and usually served to spook any muggles would got too aggressive, as guns were practically indistinguishable from magic when they were first used, and muggles usually came to think of them as strange magician’s staffs, not mundane weapons, at least at first.

Guns were developed as a hobby, but that doesn’t mean they were trapped in a stasis and didn’t improve over time. In gunnery clubs, the power of rifling or pre packed paper cartridges was discovered. Not good enough. Guncotton and percussion caps, the first steps to metal cartridges. Not good enough, but close. Revolvers, lever actions, and bolt actions were the weapons that finally changed war after centuries of magical domination. After finally reaching comparable speed, guns suddenly went from a novelty to the bleeding edge of warfare, a weapon that wasn’t limited to a tiny magical fraction of the population.

\------

8\. O What Glorious Pride and Sorrow Fill the Name of ‘98!

The Irish and their English overlords had always had a…. storied history. Religious and cultural discrimination were just part of the problem, as well as Ireland being an early testing ground for that proud English tradition of colonialism. This was a long trend, going past the Potato Famine of the 1840’s, and one of the most famed incidents was in 1798.

Inspired by the recent American and French Revolutions, unrest had grown to a boil, and even the failure of the French expedition to Ireland in 1796 couldn’t dampen Irish enthusiasm. Despite growing unrest between Catholics and Protestants and establishment of martial law by the British, the rebellion began in May.

British officials had received information about where the rebels were to gather, and sent great masses of men to put down the rebellion before it could pick up steam, and without magic it might have been the end of the Irish rebellion right there. However, one Irish magician caught on, and in one of the most famous moments of the revolution, unearthed a fully grown Mandrake plant in the middle of Dublin, after he and his associates soundproofed as many muggle houses in the area as possible.

The fatal cry of the mandrake was a turning point, and planned revolutions in the counties next to Dublin sprung up in haste as well. With a deep understanding of the terrain and assistance from both Irish and French magicians, the majority of the British were pushed out of the island in time for a massive French reinforcement in August.

Great numbers of French infantry, complemented by the ferocious muggleborn battalions the French became so famed for, and with French aid the Irish Republic was born late in 1798. The French Empire would eventually collapse after the Battle of Nations. Despite this, Ireland had been given one critical thing by the French Empire: time, nearly 15 years to prepare themselves for the British, and even without the French defending them they wouldn’t bend down to the Kings of house Hanover, or their magical cronies.

Deals with the merpeople and even negotiations with the banshees led to British landing being almost impossible, and although the reactionary powers of Europe certainly weren’t happy with a liberal republic stirring up trouble, the difficulties, both martial and diplomatic, of invading Ireland meant that it managed to stay independent and liberal, even as the armies of Europe crushed constitutional rule in Spain.

The Irish Republic was free, about 140 years ahead of schedule.

\------

9\. Irminsul

After the death of his father and eventually his brother, Charlemagne would come to rule one of the great Christian kingdoms in Europe, the Kingdom of the Franks. Early in 772 Saxon tribesmen sacked a church in Frankish lands, provoking Charlemagne to invade the Saxons.

There was a powerful religious element to this war, as Charlemagne was both Christian and from a family famed for their piety, while the Saxons were Germanic pagans who provoked the war by sacking a church. The King of the Franks hoped to crush Saxon moral early by destroying Irminsul, a sacred pillar that served as a center of worship for the pagans, before Christianizing the region, by the sword if necessary.

When the Frankish armies first saw the pillar, it sent chills down their spines as it towered above them. The air around it practically shimmered with magic, and the weakest men among Charlemagne’s army physically couldn’t approach, the aura around the tree sending them to the ground as their knees buckled under them.

As Charlemagne and his guards marched closer, things only got stranger, as a pillar with the height of a fairly sized tree started to stretch, doubling and then eventually tripling in height with every step towards it, until the originally small pillar almost seemed to be holding the sky itself up. It was getting hard to breath as they got closer, and Charlemagne was suddenly reminded of tales he was told as a boy, of sorcery and magic.

The air was choked with a strange smell that no one could quite put their fingers on, pungent and yet at the same time almost “clean”, like the scent of the air after a rainstorm. One of the men began to chop at the tree with an axe, and while the first strike bounced off the side of the pillar, the ones that followed struck true, and the pillar began to list to the side, which was certainly intimidating considering how the tree stretched into the clouds.

It leaned further and further to the side the more they worked, and after a good hour of ferocious swinging by several teams of men, and moment before it came crashing down Charlemagne thought it looked strangely like a bow, with a crescent like curve, almost as if the pillar was attached to some point in the sky.

When it collapsed, there was a terrible thundering sound, not from the body of the pillar which crushed man and tree alike, but from the sky itself. With a horrible feeling of dread in his stomach, Charlemagne looked up and for one horrible moment, it seemed as if the sky itself was falling.

\------

10\. Pax Romana

Rome always had difficulties facing those enemies which had great numbers of magic users. Very few things could check the power of a legion in the field, but a skilled druid or mage was one of them. The problem began in Cisalpine Gaul, where the tribes of the Po valley fought with strange magic that sent chaos through the ranks, causing routs and panic in the men. However, when the conquest was done, Rome learned and assimilated, as they did with so many conquests before, and in time their enemies mages swore themselves to the Republic.

When Julius Caesar marched into Gaul, resistance from mages and chieftains alike was fierce. Roman mages were still inexperienced, and many times it came down to the skill of the legionaries and Caesar’s own brilliance to succeed, and even then things were close. Alesia itself, the battle that finally brought the Gauls to heel, was incredibly close, as skilled pyromancers under Vercingetorix nearly managed to burn down the fortifications which Caesar used to trap the Gauls. Pyromancers had always proved themselves a thorn in Caesar’s side, starting when they attempted to set his Rhine bridges aflame and ending at Alesia. He was awfully fortunate the Gauls were lacking in particularly skilled fire mages.

When Rome was reborn as an empire, they continued assimilating mages from the entirety of the Mediterranean, from Lusitania in Hispania to the Kingdom of Iberia in the Caucauses, which served as one of many Roman client states that provided magical knowledge to their overlords.

Flashy battle magics were certainly impressive, but the number of emperors saved by simple use of Legilmency on the Praetorian guard was actually embarrassing, and eventually all members of the guard were replaced with magic users who were forced to take Unbreakable vows to actually serve the Emperor and not murder him.

Wards also made imperial border control significantly easier, although barbarian invasions would still be one of the great crises Rome would face. However, they wouldn’t be the end of Rome.

Magic covered so many of Rome’s weaknesses: it made communication instant, it made vows truly binding and could unveil the truth behind any number of plots. Of course, the magical aristocracy in Rome was legendarily bloated and corrupt, but their corruption could be tolerated if it meant access to actual magic.

The majority of Britannia fell to Roman forces, and Hadrian’s wall was in fact part of a much larger magical apparatus: a complex system of wards along the coast of Britain which meant invasions from the Picts or even Hibernia impossible, allowing Rome to turn her attention to the east.

Parthia would fall to Rome in time, as magicians made the logistics of invading Persia much easier than before, and allowed Roman expansion into regions like Arabia and the Sudan in the south and allowed them to push the Sarmatians out of the fertile Ukraine in the north.

A heavily enchanted ship was blown off course and found itself in a strange new land far to the West, and in time Roman colonies were being settled in this strange new land, the Occident. As some Romans went further west than ever before, others were determined to go as far east as possible, to surpass Alexander himself, and as Caesar bridged the Rhine Romans would eventually bridge the Indus.

Rome was perhaps not the ideal society to live in, a stratified empire ruled by a nearly all powerful emperor supported by ancient magical families, but in time it became the only society to live in, as the sheer force of the legions chipped away at its neighbors and Romanization efforts united the world in a way it never had been before.

Rome did not weep after running out of land to conquer, but instead set about strengthening itself into an empire that would stand the test of time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maybe I’ll finish off each chapter with some sort of crazy alternate universe that’s particularly wild? Space colonizaton, hyper-Rome, etc.


End file.
